Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @10:35AM
from the oh-you-want-everything dept.

hweimer writes "I am looking for a small (7") tablet that comes with root access out of the box. I know, I could get one of the usual suspects and root it myself, but I don't want to waste my time in the process and end up voiding my warranty. Basically, I'd like to use it for web browsing, reading PDFs and accessing my e-mails via SSH (extra bonus for X11 forwarding). Any good suggestions, or should I wait for Tizen devices to hit the market?"

I know it's a little dated, and not as fancy as other tablets, but it has everything you just asked for, along with X11 forwarding. I'd strongly suggest taking a look at it. You can even use it as a phone if you'd like. I think they are about $250 now.

When somebody is looking for something that is rare, non-existent, hard to find or really expensive it isn't a bad thing to mention but... here is something much easier to get that is ALMOST what you are looking for...

No. The device that DOES satisfy all his requirements is the hard to find one. The N900 is the easy to find alternative that ALMOST gets there. It's called compromise. Sometimes you just have to do it.

It may not be the best choice for someone who has trouble with near field vision, but the resolution of the N900 is 800x480 which is the same as any of the available 7" tablets in a similar price range.

You don't have to root it per se, but you do want to put on VeganTab or some other ROM (which likely voids the warranty, but the device is cheap for a dual 1Ghz Tegra with a 10" screen... <$250 these days). There's no "jailbreak" step like most other devices. Just put the ROM in the right place and reboot.

The Android market works great now (very improved from the situation before!), so you can load Google Earth and just about anything else without any hassle.

Also have one of these cheap USB keyboard cases [amazon.com] for it. Even with that, it still ends up being less bulky yet more fun than my old EeePC 901.

Unfortunately, Android doesn't work great with physical keyboards yet (all kinds of focus issues, and the Ctrl key annoyingly doesn't work in ConnectBot).

The keyboard case doubles as a stand, which, for under $30, has more or less solved all the viewing angle problems I had with lying the TN display flat on a surface. Feels a bit strange converting a tablet to a laptop, but it works OK for me, and I find myself traveling with this G-Tablet now instead of the EeePC (that runs Fuduntu), even though the latter is arguably more fully-functional.

>>Unfortunately, Android doesn't work great with physical keyboards yet (all kinds of focus issues, and the Ctrl key annoyingly doesn't work in ConnectBot).

Yeah, I have a transformer, which bakes the keyboard into the design of the tablet, and it's amazing how few apps support keyboards. You know, things like PDF readers not allowing pageup/pagedown/home/end keys to work, things which are, you know, actually useful to improving the PDF reading experience.

Yeah, I've been playing with the "Linux Installer" app, but it never quite runs its scripts successfully. But if you can get it to work you can pretty much debootstrap and ARM dist of debian in a loop device that you can chroot into and pretty much run anything you can install with apt through ConnectBot or AndroidVNC.

You're still saddled with Android for driver support, but at this point that seems to be a good thing on most devices. Haven't been too encouraged by progress on direct ports of Linux, but s

I second the HP firesale Touchpads. They have excellent, sharp bright displays, and are very snappy and functional with WebOS. Although the hardware is at end of life (or maybe not, there's talk of Win8 on them soon), HP is still committed to the WebOS thing, either they will continue and make a new Touchpad someday, or will try to sell off the WebOS division, but either way it's not being buried like the hardware was. Updates from HP continue to present day, I got one last week.

None. Every tablet with Android has to be rooted and vendors are working very, very hard to fight the small percentage of users that do root. The closest you can get are tablets that don't sign the kernel and allow you to customize the OS (load cyanogenmod or something) but increasingly vendors are on the attack against that (B&N clamping down on the Nook Tablet, Samsung pushing out an update that locks down the platform.)

Tizen-based devices will, thus far, simply allow for a more standard *nix platform and other ready-made and compatible distributions, but that still requires you work your way through the first line of vendor hostilities (platsec misused against you) and then the second line of vendor hostilities (proprietary, signed bootloader and possibly a checksummed kernel.)

It's extra shitty in the mobile space these days, especially for those who like to do a little more than blindly consume.

The only cases of updates enforcing any sort of "lockdown" that I know of is disabling nvflash mode on the Tab 10.1 (Odin mode still works fine for flashing) and implementing the "custom binary count" counter on their phones. Samsung is, if anything, very developer-friendly.

Looks like they've only done this once with the original Froyo/Gingerbread Tab series.

They've moved (as mentioned in some threads on the subject) to signed-but-not-locked bootloaders (Including later software updates for the Tabs based on what I can read.)

Samsung's current strategy is to verify the signature of any kernel flashed in download (Odin) mode. If the kernel is not a signed Samsung release, the bootloader increments a "custom binary count" counter and pops up a warning screen until you flash an o

The closest you can get are tablets that don't sign the kernel and allow you to customize the OS (load cyanogenmod or something) but increasingly vendors are on the attack against that (B&N clamping down on the Nook Tablet, Samsung pushing out an update that locks down the platform.)

Uh...would that be the same Samsung that donated [phandroid.com] Galaxy S II phones to the cyanogenmod devs, so they could get it working well with the platform? What update are you talking about? They seem very friendly to the rooting and custom rom community.

Same here, go for the Nook Color, get a class 10 micro SD card and live happily ever after. Cyanogen Mod works great on mine. Seriously though, you didn't list anything that would actually require root so why does it even matter?

Um, no. Do NOT get a class 10 SD card if you are planning to boot from the SD card. Class 10 is optimized for sequential read/write of large files. It will have very poor random access performance. It is an unavoidable trade-off. Running an OS is mostly random small read/writes. Get a SanDisk class 4 card, or any other card with high scores on the "4K Random Write" benchmark. See this [xda-developers.com] thread for more details (the thread refers to WP7 but the same is true for Android)..

The Nook Color would be my recommendation as well. It may only have a single core 800MHz processor but I haven't had any issues doing everything you require it to do. The simplicity of putting a custom ROM on it is second to none and the screen is excellent. With them selling for less than $150 refurbished there's really no reason to worry about voiding a warranty.

None of the things that you said you want to do require root access. Web browsing, SSH, X11 forwarding, PDFs... You can do that all with an Android device without rooting. Heck, you can do that with an Apple device without jailbreaking.

Exactly. This is a great example of "are you using the right tool for the right job?" Does hweimer want to actually take a tablet and start learning the innards of the software or do they just want something convenient to carry around the house or the neighborhood that does basic things? Richard Stallman makes is career and life out of using nothing but free software that he understands from top to bottom. He makes a good point but he's an extreme case. My personal advise is don't get caught up in the

If that is all he wants to do with a 7 inch tablet, why would he spend $500+ for a 10" Apple device? Too much product, too much money.

Kindle Fire. He needs sound exactly like my needs. I own the Fire, it has a lot of limitations, but they are things I don't care about. I read, I check facebook, play free games, check out gnews and y&g email, I mail myself PDFs of book (Amazon has tons of free books as well). I have no intention of BUYING books from Amazon, (I do buy other stuff from them) but I like

I do not want to invest my time into getting familiar with a device whose artificial limitations are guaranteed to make my life miserable at some point in the future, even if it does not present an immediate problem right now. For example, one thing I didn't mention is running an OpenVPN client. That definitely requires root access.

Let's just imagine you bought a car to drive to work in and go on occasional weekend trips to the countryside.

Now let's imagine, when you get the keys and enter in there's a little contract lying there which says "you can drive to work, you can have work colleagues, but if you want to drive out of town on a weekday evening then you need to pay extra and if you want to have a girlfriend in the car, that's not allowed". You'd be pissed.

The guy wants to buy a tablet which he owns not Apple. He wants to do normal stuff on it, but he doesn't, within reason, want someone else telling him what he can and can't do with it. Is that so complex? Why do we always get a bunch of Applesoft trolls coming on and telling us "oh; but you didn't say you wanted to drive around with a girlfriend". Of course he didn't. This is slashdot, he doesn't expect to get a girlfriend, but when he does get one he's not going to be happy with your restrictions. Now he'd just like to buy and own a tablet. Later he can decide what he doesn't want to do with it.

Sometimes people post in their own question about how they are capable of rooting a tablet themselves but don't want to waste the time while being perfectly happy to waste their time (much more than would be needed to actually root an android device) and the time of others with this silly question. He could have rooted a tablet 10 times over in the amount of time it will take him to get a useful response from this thread. I think that makes him an idiot.

Maybe that is his reason for wanting the device to be rooted, maybe it isn't. He doesn't say, so it is dangerous to assume why he wants it prerooted. Maybe it is for freedom, maybe it is for flexibility (freedom isn't always flexible), maybe (as I assumed when I read the OP) he thinks his list of requirements will require the device be rooted. But the point is we don't know why he wants the device to be rooted.

And I really wish he had said. Because then we could actually answer his deeper question more

iSSH is good, but for X11 sessions iLIVEx is definitely worth checking out, It uses a modified version of the X protocol, but it allows you to load individual X apps and suspend them . . . sort of like screen but graphical.

If you want to install Wireshark (Airshark?) you must have root access. For me that is the first app I want on any android device. I'm not happy unless I have a full battery of tools with which to sniff the network. Root access required.

Well, with hardware warranties being so short, "down the road" puts him into the "don't have to worry about voiding the warranty" territory, which was his only stated reason for preferring a pre-rooted device.

Actually, you look to be right, I can't actually find any x11 servers (or SSH clients that claim to do SSH forwarding) for Android, rooted or otherwise. But that doesn't really change the point, since in this case, rooting the device isn't getting you more anyhow.

Ironic, that, since there are multiple x11 servers in the iOS app store, such as iSSH.

It's a very common use-case to want to ssh in to a remote computer and start an application that has a X based GUI. Clearly you don't want the application's GUI to appear on the remote computer's console which is probably in the same server farm as the remote computer, if it exists at all. So ssh has the ability to pretend to be an X-server on the remote box and forward all the X traffic to an X-server running on the device you are sitting in front of.

It'd be pretty stupid and useless to have an x11 server sitting there displaying a blank screen with little to no applications that can be used on the X-server.

And I used openssh on my Android tablet, before I dumped it for a touchpad -- you have heard of openssh, right?

That'll forward the x11 traffic, but doesn't do anything to display it.

How is it "ironic" that you are apparently too ignorant of the Android hacker ecosystem to even know what to look for? Most of the people who could port an X server to Android don't feel the need to -- they just run vncserver (or Xvfb+x11vnc) in a debian chroot, and connect to it using an Android VNC viewer -- if there was a comparable desktop distribution of OS X that ran on ARM and used the iOS kernel, people would be chrooting and using OS X apps too, because there's no point reinventing the wheel.

So, let me get this straight, if I want to run some remote x11 app on my phone, on my iPhone I just fire up iSSH and run the command to forward, but if I want to do it on Android, I need to install debian on my phone in a chroot jail, use openssh to forward x11 to my phone's debian chroot, where I connect to the remote x11 app, and then I VNC from my phone to my phone?

Umm, no, sorry, I'm not insane, I'll just run the one app that does it

Just remember that the Nook Color is wifi only, has no camera, and no microphone unless you use bluetooth. And as it stands right now, the bluetooth connection has a VERY limited range. Also, the mSD card you get can make or break whether or not it is stable. Your best bet is with a Sandisk class 2 or class 4 mSD card. Higher class cards lead to instability and force closes, and other brand cards can be hit-or-miss.

Actually it doesn't cost any money or add any complication. That comes into play when they start adding DRM and lockdown, or removing these features since this behavior is virtually ingrained into things from the ground up then stripped out.

Everything you could pretty much want. But only 16GB. Only one SD slot. Wish they had a way to upgrade the on-board flash to larger capacities. We seriously need a smaller footprint for SSD's. Would be perfect with 128gb.

You can put whatever OS you want on it and the manufacturer encourages it, it just happens to come with android which is Linux under the covers.

Their website does mention warranty-voiding, but at least in the G8 series, and I assume G9 as well, they only mean by that that they are not responsible for software problems resulting from the unlocking. I asked Archos' tech support before unlocking my 43 G8, and they said that hardware problems will continue to be covered. I subsequently had hardware problems and they sent me a replacement with no difficulties.

"I am looking for people who know how to use google out of the box. I know, I could get one of the usual suspects and post my question on slashdot, but I don't want to waste my time in the process and end up voiding my status as being too important to look it up myself. Basically, I like to tell people I'm a power user but really I'm not. Any good suggestions, or should I ask Siri?"

No, the obvious reason I posted anonymously is because I don't have a Slashdot account.

It wasn't obvious from your post that you don't have an account. In fact, I'd say it's the opposite. The phrase, "Posting anon for obvious reasons," is a common Slashdot phrase for people with accounts who are posting something they are afraid to put their handle behind.

How about you, Raenex? Is that the name on your birth certificate, or are you hiding, like a coward, too?

Having a pseudonym, like pretty much everybody does here, allows you to build a reputation. That is why people will post anonymously sometimes even when they have a pseudonym.

When I see AC, i tend to think they posted that way because they don't have an account. That should be the most obvious reason. (It's a Mensa thing. You know, outside-the-box kind of thinking.)

You could actually respond to the argument I gave instead of attacking a straw man. It's an intellectual honesty kind of thinking. In case you missed it, it's the rest of the paragraph after the part you quoted.

Is it not possible to do build a reputation by using your real name, or are you hiding like a coward, too?

There's a spectrum from full anonymity to full identification. A pseudonym is a middle ground that is in some ways cowardly, but useful if I want to talk about work situations, while still providing some of the benefits of a persistent identity.

The karma bullshit has turned this forum into a fucking popularity contest and I, for one, am tired of seeing the same fanbois and filesharing thieves modding each other's parroted arguments up.

Declare it dead for whatever reason you want. The fact is you ignored my argument and responded to a different one. Now you are just dodging it completely.

It was an important argument, too, because it was the sole reason I even bothered to make the post that started this little debate. I do NOT consider every person who doesn't want to be bothered with an account a coward. My original statement was aimed at what sounded like somebody who had an account that was afraid to post with it.

You ignored the sole reason why I even bothered to comment in the first place, and it was the phrase, "Posting anon for obvious reasons." This phrase is usually used by people who have accounts. I really wasn't interested in getting into a debate on the overall value of Anonymous Cowards.

Heil Hitler!!

This is why Godwin's Law was invented in the first place. The idea of any meaningful discussion occurring after something like this is unlikely. I let it slide once, but no more replies from me.

After seeing some of the posts in recent threads; I'm tempted to agree. I come to slashdot to see opinions of people who have personal experience in subjects relating to stories they're commenting on. It's great when it happens but it seems to be fairly rare.

The point of these is not so much for the person asking the question to get The Best Answer (tm) but rather to spark an interesting discussion which many will enjoy and possibly learn from. Over the years I've learned a TON of useful or entertaining things from Ask Slashdot discussions, many of which I would never have known to ask about in a google search or otherwise.

From this discussion I've already learned about Tizen [tizen.org] which I had never heard of before today. I also enjoyed a few

I cannot speak for the upcoming Transformer Prime, but its predecessor TF101 can be rooted extremely easily (no time wasted here).OTA updates keep working and the rooting can easily be undone (actually, the device gets automatically un-rooted every time you do an OTA update).The super simple rooting procedure is discussed here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1198303 [xda-developers.com]You basically just download a jar to your computer, connect the tablet via USB and follow the instructions on screen. It takes less than 5 minutes. I cannot guarantee that it does not invalidate the warranty, but I would say it doesn't.

I had good experiences with this $200 SmartQ 7 7" tablet which I got 3 years ago (for $200). Runs an Ubuntu build that's mostly in english; apt-get did everything i needed to get my remote desktop on. I don't have a Nook so I'm not sure how it compares.

The supplier I used seems to be out of stock, but presumably there are others:http://www.dealextreme.com/p/smartdevices-smartq-7-7-0-touchscreen-linux-mid-internet-tablet-667mhz-cpu-wifi-bluetooth-1gb-27904

Yes, if only there were a single tablet on the market that didn't require rooting to do such complicated tasks as web browsing, reading PDFs, or even [android.com] a [google.com] single [apple.com] SSH [apple.com] client [google.com].

Look, I'm all in favor of individuals having control of their devices. But I'm pretty sure there's a reason nobody sells a rooted tablet that does exactly the same things as everyone else's tablets. If you can't even answer why you need root access, don't expect to find a product that will.

Its been a while since I checked, but Archos used to make a complete source dump with build instructions for you
to rebuild the version of android they use. They use an older 2.2 version, but they seem to be relatively hacker friendly.

Any good suggestions, or should I wait for Tizen devices to hit the market?

I haven't seen much from Tizen beyond their initial press release. And, yes, I subscribe to their mailing list. So I would speculate that it is all chartware at the moment. Maybe we will see a Tizen SDK next year sometime. And maybe even devices in 2013. Or maybe, like Maemo and MeeGo before it, just before it is ready to go prime time . . . someone will say, "Hey, let's give it a new name and start all over again, yippee!"

MeeGoo is already alive and kicking on the Nokia N9. It's a lot of fun having a cell phone that you can VNC to, mount with SSHFS, etc. Is all this necessary? No, but it's fun.

it is 9" but he HP Touchpad doesn't have to be rooted. Simply enter developer mode ( just type webos20090606) and you've got root access. If not for poor decision making by execs and poor advertising more people would understand just how much you can do with WebOS and the touchpad.

Not the warranty you actually care about, anyway. Even if you root the software, that only voids the software warranty. The hardware is still covered under any applicable warranty. If the piece of junk falls apart in your hands after you rooted it, there is nothing preventing you from sending it back for a replacement. Flash the software back to stock if you are paranoid about it. The manufacturers and carriers don't give you root by default because the average person would fuck up their device if they had root access. Not giving you root limits their liability so they dont have to replace devices because some dumbass fubared his/system partition. If you can root, then you can also learn how to fix the damn software yourself. It becomes your own responsibility. Fixing defective hardware is always the manufacterer's responsibility, unless you modded the hardware. See Magnusson-Moss warranty act [wikipedia.org]

See other poster above. Put it in developer mode. Viola. Busybox terminal simply by connecting with novaterm.

Step 2: Add prewareStep 3: Add ssh, whatever other fun optware stuff you want, etc. For example, I run bash, openvpn, privoxy (who needs the built in web browser to support ad blocking when you can add privoxy and iptables rules?)

If you don't like doing everything with webos apps, you can run an ubuntu environment.

I know I know, getting your hands on one won't be as easy as going to Best Buy et al. and grabbing one from the shelves, but it does do all of the requested tasks (running ubuntu with X11 in a card right now). "Rooting" is as trivial as getting to the hidden Developer app and flipping a switch to turn Developer Mode on. A little install of Preware and you're good to go. I don't believe it voids the warranty, although the process or some of the software you end up installing (Govnah, for instance) may indee

Not owning a tablet or smart phone, what exactly does "root access" mean? I do not think these all run Unix so there's no "root" account. If the OS doesn't support letting you do everything then you're stuck unless you can find an alternate OS that runs on that device.

If I were you I would not wait for Tizen or take the project seriously. Back when I bought my first netbook around 2009, my expectation was that I would use it to run Moblin, since I had read about the system and seen the demos. My expectation was that it was pretty much going to be the most awesome thing ever, and I thought it was interesting that the project was backed by Intel (now I think that it was stupid). In retrospect, Intel probably saw the project as a cheap way to get people to buy more Atom chips, but had no real interest in actually investing in the software.

Anyway, Moblin actually did make releases, which I eagerly gobbled up and loaded onto my netbook with anticipation. Every release sucked badly; it was just a shitty Linux distro hastily thrown together by a bunch of buffoons that didn't know what they were doing. The project was all hype and no elbow grease; the window manager was cool, but the overall environment was barren. My optimistic self was saying, it's OK, these are just initial releases! They're working hard on it! The project died abruptly, and Intel decided to dump the thing on Nokia, who thought that somehow it was a good idea to just merge the system with Maemo and call it Meego. I thought, "Ah, finally, the project has been rebooted and we'll see some results." I eagerly gobbled up the subsequent Meego releases. It was, in fact, no different Moblin... it has just been rebranded. They did smooth out enough of the bugs to actually make the system usable and implement some internal changes, but ultimately the system was still pitifully stagnant.

Lo and behold, they finally decided to throw in the towel, and one morning I visit Meego's website to check for a new release only to find an announcement that the project was canceled. Meego is no more, but wait! They want all the Moblin/Meego people to go follow Tizen now! It's backed by the Linux Foundation! The Linux Foundation has already proven that they can't develop shit. They're just a marketing organization that knows how to make nice little web pages.

Seeing Meego going and Tizen coming is like listening to the HURD project talking about why it switched from Mach to L4. OK, so you decided to cancel development of an unfinished project and radically redesign it and start over from scratch. We should care why? The people behind Tizen are probably right now flying to a conference to meet with the teams from HURD and Duke Nukem Forever to share development strategies.

The question is, why do we need Tizen? Every description I've read describing what Tizen is supposed to be looks like it was just copied and pasted from Palm press releases when they began developing webOS. webOS is now a mature, complete, functioning system running on big name hardware. Sure, HP royally screwed things up, but my faith is that webOS will live on. In the mean time, Android is pretty much unstoppable. Neither Android nor webOS are as open source to the extent that Tizen would be, which will probably be the one thing that keeps me following Tizen regardless, but I don't have much hope for it.

Do keep in mind that they're distancing themselves from MeeGo because Nokia managed to squeeze out permission to use the name for a not-quite-MeeGo device only to have Elop come and say "no matter how successful it is we're going to drop it." This painted MeeGo as a dead end, despite it not truly being possible to kill an open source platform. And MeeGo was backed by the Linux Foundation as well, so there's no real change in that aspect.

HP Touchpad. You enter a code in the search bar and you have developers mode. Mess with it as hard as you want. WebOS doctor puts everything back the way it was. Screen is bigger than what you are looking for though.

Check this one out for example [benton-cn.com]. The good thing about doing this is, you're working directly with the manufacturer and have all the control over the software on the device that you desire.